mjpg, i just checked and it looks like i’m seeing the same thing you are (with wp 3.21, bbpress 2.1, buddypress 1.5): forum participant user is not able to access either hidden and private forums (although forum moderator works fine).

hmmm…. is this actually working (forum participants can access hidden forums?) for everyone else/

Andre – before I add this as a possible bug on Trac, is it possible that this is intended or a feature?

It seems to me that making a user a ‘forum participant’ should allow them to view on of hidden/private forums, although I’m not clear about the destinction between hidden and private. But perhaps the Devs think that private/hidden should only be seen by mods and above. If so, it makes private forums tricky.

If set up without the ‘read_hidden_forums’ capability, forums are visible, but not topics. I don’t know if this is real or because I have been switching the hidden/private setting for the forum during testing.

I have done some basic testing and access/posting/replies/create topic/uploads/subscribe all seem to work OK.

I guess this could be done simply via some code in functions.php, but I don’t have the time to investigate.

mjpg, thanks for writing up the ticket and for the plugin info. i added “read_hidden_forums” only to forum participant capabilities and now a test user forum participant can see a hidden forum in the forum index, but still can’t read it.

andre, thanks for the info. that makes sense to me wrt to user roles, groups and forums. guess you are right: need jjj to say whether bug or feature and if feature, how to properly configure and use.

There is nothing to work out IMHO. mjpg (posted above) has provided the ideal “Work Around” that I think is perfect. Use another plugin to augment this one and provide even MORE flexibility to your permissions.

Don’t ask the bbPress developers to take their time to reinvent the wheel when someone else has already done it. The Drupal community is excellent at referring to each others modules as “dependencies” for certain functionality.

WordPress has a ways to go in this respect, but I have to admit bbPress is better than any of the Drupal offerings when combined with a nice $40 theme purchased online. The phpBB –> bbPress transfer tools are also both quite useful. I just switched to bbPress and plan to be using it for a long time to come so keep it coming guys! Great work!

I changed the user site role from subscriber trying the lowest ranks up to author and left the forum role to participant and it worked. I went back and set the user back to subscriber and it works like before the upgrade.

I’m having a similar problem. And I must tell Andre that, yes, it seems a bug and is not intended to be that way. As you can read at https://codex.bbpress.org/bbpress-user-roles-and-capabilities/#participant they are supposed to read private forums. My private users (with participant role) can see the private forums and navigate through them and their sub-forums, but all topics (on private forums and also on private sub-forums inside private forums) there is a message that no topic has been found. If I just give them upper permissions (Moderator), then they can see all the topics on these forums and alos reply, etc.

So I think it’s truely a bug. Strange to me that it’s been around for some months without being fixed 🙁